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Hope
Unlimited
Chapter
4: Just
and The Justifier
WE
HAVE SEEN the ungodly justified, and have considered the great
truth, that only God can justify any man; we now come a step further
and make the inquiry - How can a just God justify guilty men?
Here please
allow me to give you a bit of personal experience. When I first came
under
the hand of the Holy Spirit, under conviction of sin, I had a clear
and sharp sense of the justice of God. Sin, whatever it might be to
other people, became to me an intolerable burden. It was not so much
that I feared hell, but that I feared sin. I knew myself to be so
horribly guilty that I remember feeling that if God did not punish
me for sin He ought to do so. I felt that the Judge of all the earth
ought to condemn such sin as mine. I sat on the judgment seat, and I
condemned myself to perish; for I confessed that had I been God I
could have done no other than send such a guilty creature as I was
down to the lowest hell. All the while, I had upon my mind a deep
concern for the honor of God's name, and the integrity of His moral
government. I felt that it would not satisfy my conscience if I
could be forgiven unjustly. The sin I had committed must be
punished. But then there was the question how God could be just, and
yet justify me who had been so guilty. I asked my heart: "How
can He be just and yet be the justifier?" I was worried and
wearied with this question; neither could I see any answer to it.
Certainly, I could never have invented an answer which would have
satisfied my conscience.
The
doctrine of the atonement is to my mind one of the surest proofs of
the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture. Who would or could have
thought of the just Ruler dying for the unjust rebel? This is no
teaching of human mythology, or dream of poetical imagination. This
method of making amends for sin is only known among men because it is a fact;
fiction could not have devised it. God Himself ordained it; it is
not a matter which could have been imagined.
I
had heard the plan of salvation by the sacrifice of Jesus from my
youth up; but I did not know any more about it in my innermost soul
than if I had been born and bred a Hottentot. The light was there,
but I was blind; it was of necessity that the Lord himself should
make the matter plain to me. It came to me as a new revelation, as
fresh as if I had never read in Scripture that Jesus was declared to
be the propitiation for sins that God might be just. I believe it
will have to come as a revelation to every newborn child of God
whenever he sees it; I mean that glorious doctrine of the
substitution of the Lord Jesus. I came to understand that salvation
was possible through a substitutionary sacrifice; and that provision had
been made in the first constitution and arrangement of things for
such a substitution. I was made to see that He who is the Son of
God, co-equal, and co-eternal with the Father, had of old been made
the covenant Head of a chosen people that He might in that capacity
suffer for them and save them. Inasmuch as our fall was not at the
first a personal one, for we fell in our federal representative, the
first Adam, it became possible for us to be recovered by a second
representative, even by Him who has undertaken to be the covenant
head of His people, so as to be their second Adam. I saw that before
I
actually sinned I had fallen by my first father's sin; and I
rejoiced that therefore it became possible in point of law for me to
rise by a second head and representative. The fall by Adam left a
loophole of escape; another Adam can undo the ruin made by the
first. When I was anxious about the possibility of a just God
pardoning me, I understood and saw by faith that He who is the Son
of God became man, and in His own blessed person bore my sin in His
own body on the tree. I saw the chastisement of my peace was laid on
Him, and that with His stripes I was healed.
Dear friend, have you
ever seen that? Have you ever understood how God can be just to the
full, not remitting penalty nor blunting the edge of the sword, and
yet can be infinitely merciful, and can justify the ungodly who turn
to Him? It was because the Son of God, supremely glorious in His
matchless person, undertook to satisfy the demands of the law by bearing the
sentence due to me, that therefore God is able to pass by my sin.
The law of God was more satisfied by the death of Jesus than it
would have been had all transgressors been sent to Hell. For the Son
of God to suffer for sin was a more glorious establishment of the
government of God, than for the whole race to suffer.
Jesus
has borne the death penalty on our behalf. Behold the wonder! There
He hangs upon the cross! This is the greatest sight you will ever
see. Son of God and Son of Man, there He hangs, bearing pains
unutterable, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. Oh, the
glory of that sight! The innocent punished! The Holy One condemned!
The Ever-blessed made a curse! The infinitely glorious put to a
shameful death! The more I look at the sufferings of the Son of God,
the more sure I am that they must meet my case. Why did He suffer,
if not to turn aside the penalty from us? If, then, He turned it
aside by His death, it is turned aside, and those who believe in Him
need not fear it. It must be so, that since the demands of God's
holy law have been satisfied by the death of His Son, God
is able to forgive without shaking the basis of His throne, or in
the least degree blotting the statute book. Conscience gets a full
answer to her tremendous question. The wrath of God against
iniquity, whatever that may be, must be beyond all conception
terrible. Well did Moses say, "Who knows the power of your
anger?" Yet when we hear the Lord of glory as He hung upon the
cross crying out, "Why have you forsaken me?" and we see Him yielding up
His life, we feel
that the justice of God has been abundantly satisfied - by
obedience so perfect, by death so terrible, and by One so divine. If God himself bows before His own law, what more can be
done? There is more merit in the atonement made by Jesus, than there is
demerit in all human sin.
The
great gulf of Jesus' loving self-sacrifice can swallow up our mountains of
sin, all of them. For the sake of the infinite
good of this one representative man - Jesus - the Lord may well look with
favor upon other men, however unworthy they may be in and of
themselves. It was a miracle of miracles that the Lord Jesus should stand in our stead and "bear
that we might never bear
His Father's righteous anger." But
he has done so. "It is finished."
God will spare the
sinner because He did not spare His Son.
God can pass by your
transgressions because He laid those transgressions upon His only
begotten Son nearly two thousand years ago. If you believe in Jesus
(that is the point), then your sins were carried away by Him who was
the scapegoat, the substitutionary sacrifice for His people.
What
is it to believe in Him? It is not merely to say, "He is God
and the Saviour," but to trust Him wholly and entirely, and
take Him for all your salvation from this time forth and forever -
your Lord, your Master, your Friend, your all.
If you will have Jesus,
He has you already. If you believe on Him, I tell you you cannot go
to hell; for that would make the sacrifice of Jesus of none
effect. It cannot be that a sacrifice should be accepted, and yet
the soul should die for whom that sacrifice has been received. If
the believing soul could be condemned, then why a sacrifice? If
Jesus died in my stead, why should I die also? Every believer can
claim that the sacrifice was actually made for him: by faith he has
laid his hands on it, and made it his own, and therefore he may rest
assured that he can never perish. The Lord would not receive this
offering on our behalf, and then condemn us to die. The Lord cannot
read our pardon written in the blood of His own Son, and then smite
us. That were impossible. Oh that you may have grace given you at
once to look away to Jesus and to begin at the beginning, even at
Jesus, who is the Fountain-head of mercy to guilty man!
"He
justifies the ungodly." "It is God who justifies,"
therefore, and for that reason only it can be done, and He does it
through the atoning sacrifice of His divine Son. Therefore it can be
justly done- so justly done that none will ever question it - so
thoroughly done that in the last tremendous day, when heaven and
earth shall pass away, there shall be none that shall deny the
validity of the justification. "Who is he that condemns? It
is Jesus who died. Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's
elect? It is God who justifies."
Now,
poor soul! will you come into this lifeboat, just as you are? Here
is safety from the wreck! Accept the sure deliverance. "I have
nothing with me," you can say. You are not asked to bring anything
with you. Men who escape for their lives will leave even their
clothes behind. Leap for it, now, just as you are.
I
will tell you this thing about myself to encourage you. My sole hope
for heaven lies in the full atonement made upon Calvary's cross for
the ungodly. On that I firmly rely. I have not the shadow of a hope
anywhere else. You are in the same condition as I am; for we, neither
of us, have anything of our own in which we can trust. Let us
join hands and stand together at the foot of the cross, and trust
our souls once and for all time to Him who shed His blood for the guilty. We
will be saved by one and the same Saviour. If you perish trusting
Him, I must perish too. What can I do more to prove my own
confidence in the gospel which I set before you?
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